dribblingpensioner, would you mind identifying which other things people are waiting for to get answers from the blog support? I have had my blog here for more than 5 years and I do not recall coming across the type of problem we are discussing lately with the stats.

Yes, that would be why I pointed out that none of us are paying for them. Your purchase of other upgrades is irrelevant. You may be a paying customer, but the things you are paying for do not include stats. If they want to experiment with them or even remove them entirely, they can. And if they don't feel like explaining what's happening, there's nothing you can do to compel them.

My point was that it is highly unlikely any of Automattic's VIP clients are using the inhouse stats system and nothing else. It is also highly unlikely that if CNN or Techcrunch noticed a significant blip in their stats and asked for an explanation that they would be ignored.

I am now moving to completely believe in the conspiracy theory on this issue. I am guessing that a hacker got into WordPress, messed with the program and was the source of the WordPress.com referrer problem in the first place.

Not only that, while the staff was off on their "offsite", the hacker came into this discussion as both Macmanx and Matt and left false messages about what had happened (note how neither of these two has returned to the discussion for more than two weeks, even though they were supposedly "away" when it started).

WordPress doesn't want to admit that it -- indeed its "founder" -- got hacked and misrepresented to those of us who count on it. So they are hoping that it will just quietly go away. Frankly, it doesn't look like that is going to happen.

I'm hosting a week-long program on my blog this week and as expected it has brought quite a number of visits to the site. In fact, it is my best week ever. However, the stats are skewed due to the bloated stats from wordpress.com referrer week.

It's incredible that WP Support has still not bothered to offer any coherent explanation of what happened. Not even an acknowledgment that they are aware of our pleas for attention on this matter. I don't know what to make of this development given that Support is usually very good and responsive to most issues.

Going to close this because I'm not sure what people are asking for anymore -- people seem similarly mad that their stats were high or low, or that numbers don't add up exactly with what some third-party tracking system says.

If you see "wordpress.com" in your referrers, it's means it's traffic coming from our new social stuff like the reader on the homepage, or tags, or Freshly Pressed. These things are driving a ton of pageviews, so it will be noticeable on your stats, especially if you use the subscription widget or encourage people to follow you some other way.

However I don't want to leave anyone hanging, and happy to look into individual blog issues over Thanksgiving week. Going to close this thread, but start a new one (with a single question) and tag it "formatt" and I'll take a look.